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Scientists Pursue Technologies to Feed Earth’s Growing Population

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Phillip C Kurata

With the world’s population growing by millions every month, several billion more people will need to be fed by mid-century, according to U.N. projections.

Two scientists, one from India, the other from the United States, have developed technologies that will help provide nutrition for the 9 billion people that the United Nations expects will inhabit the Earth four decades from now. To give a sense of the speed of global population growth and the urgency of the food challenge, the number of people on Earth reached 6 billion just before the start of the new millennium. According to the World Bank, 1.4 billion of them subsisted on less than $1.25 a day. Their numbers will grow dramatically without breakthroughs in food security in the coming decades, according to Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General Jacques Diouf.

TEACH A MAN TO FISH

Gupta won the World Food Prize in 2005 for teaching poor farmers in Asia how to use roadside ditches, ponds and other neglected water bodies to raise fish. Gupta’s freshwater fish farming methods, known as aquaculture, have provided millions of rural families in Asia with better nutrition and added income. Gupta’s techniques have also improved the environment. Using what was previously considered farm waste, Gupta has taught farmers to recycle it for aquaculture.

In the 1980s, Gupta applied his aquaculture methods to Bangladesh, where two-thirds of the land is flooded by monsoons four to six months a year. Gupta found the rural areas pocked with hundreds of thousands of ditches and ponds, dug by farmers to build elevated earthen platforms so their huts would not be submerged in the seasonal floods.

Gupta taught Bangladesh farmers to increase fish production from 300 kilograms per hectare to more than 5,000 kilograms per hectare in a matter of months. “This has revolutionized rural aquaculture and has led to improved livelihoods and nutrition of the rural population,” he said.

Other Asian countries, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia among them, have adopted Gupta’s aquaculture methods with great success, but he has not been able to obtain similar results in Africa. Gupta said his efforts to transplant aquaculture in Africa have “failed” because his methods did not mesh with local social, economic and cultural practices there. He said that he is working on developing aquaculture techniques that are compatible with local African conditions. He did not offer further details.

TEACH A MAN TO PRESERVE HIS FISH

Philip E. Nelson, the American scientist who won the World Food Prize in 2007, said Gupta’s work embodies the ancient Chinese proverb, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Nelson says if the proverb were to embody his own work, it would say, “Teach a man to preserve his fish, and he will feed his village and also make some money.”

Nelson was awarded the World Food Prize for his work in food preservation. Nelson’s most widely known achievements are in the field of aseptic processing, which involves sterilizing food and packaging it in sterile containers. Boxed juices, milk, and soups that can sit on shelves at room temperature are examples of foods that have undergone aseptic processing. They keep indefinitely without refrigeration and can be transported long distances easily. As a professor of food science at Purdue University in Indiana, Nelson oversees research on preserving a broad range of plant and animal foods.

Nelson explained that food preservation is a complement to production in any campaign to nourish the burgeoning global population. “What I’m focusing on is trying to reduce food loss,” Nelson said. “We produce a lot of food that is lost before it is consumed.”